I've been grappling for a while with how to handle settlement recruitment. The issue is how many people should you be able to recruit, depending on settlement size. The "Ultimate Campaign" rules make it plain that you can't just throw around an unlimited amount of capital in a small settlement; there is a limit to what can be accomplished depending on size. But it never seems to talk about headcounts specifically, and since the limits the rules impose are daily, you could conceivably recruit an army from a tiny village in the long run, which makes no sense to me.
So I started first of all to think about heroes, which are my mechanic, not in Paizo's books. How many heroes should be available per settlement? And I thought, well, 1% potential heroes sounds like a sensible number, and 0.1% gifted heroes. The problem with these hard percentages though is that... they reveal the size of the town, which is a piece of info I don't want the players to get for free. I want them to be forced to commit time and resources to get to know the settlements, so I needed a more vague way of deriving the recruitment limits from settlement size.
Finally, I decided instead of 1% heroes it would be 1d1% heroes, if that notation makes any sense. So let's say a settlement has 2,000 residents. 1% of that would be 20, so 20 would be the POTENTIAL maximum heroes from there. So I roll 1d20 to get the actual maximum. Say I roll 13. That means there are 13 heroes max. But I could have rolled 1 or 20, so the actual number of heroes doesn't give away too much about the population size.
Gifted heroes meanwhile are derived from the regular hero maximum as follows: for every 10 heroes, 1 of them is potentially gifted. So for our hypothetical settlement of 2,000 for which I rolled 13, 12 are regular heroes, and 1 is gifted (though if the other 12 are recruited, and a player wants to recruit one more regular hero, he can use up the gifted slot for him; the gifted one is a STATISTICAL POSSIBILITY based on settlement size, not a certainty, and if a player uses that slot for a regular hero, well, that settlement simply never had a gifted one).
And finally there is the question of recruits for teams, organizations, managers, cohorts, followers, and so on: and I place this number at 10%. Now you would think that this would reveal the population, but in this case I don't really need to reveal the maximum recruits because this, unlike the hero numbers, will tend to be a fairly large number that the players don't need to know. In our example of the 2,000-population settlement, that would be 200 people. So instead the stats show how many units have been recruited in total by various players, and once that number hits 200—which may take irl months or years, or might even never happen—then I tell the players they can't recruit more from this settlement, and that, finally, reveals the population; which is fine since by that time the players will already have a lot of experience with the settlement. They will probably have researched the number much earlier anyway.
That said, if you hit the 10% recruits, you can keep going, but I plan to make it progressively more expensive. Say up to 10% you pay normal prices, but between 10-20% you must pay double. Something like that. I haven't thought this through yet and won't until it shows up in the game, at which point we'll all have had enough experience with the system to decide what's a reasonable markup to charge.
Now in earlier drafts of these rules I used to have a refresh date for each settlement: one year after the first recruitment, the recruit slots would refresh, and you could recruit another 13 heroes or whatever. But really, this would make no sense, because then in a few years you'd have been able to recruit dozens of heroes from a mere town of 2,000, while the whole point of these percentages I am introducing is to underscore that a town of 2,000 can only have AT MOST 1% heroes (and 0.1% gifted heroes). 1% PER GENERATION, not 1% per year. And a generation is supposed to be somewhere around 30 years... In human years at any rate. (Let's not blow up the math by thinking about humanoids right now.)
So the hero slots listed on each settlement are for all intents and purposes... permanent. I redid Sandpoint's math from scratch, and that's what you can see in the pic above, and that "Heroes 10; Gifted 1" is all there'll ever be, pretty much. Once these pools are drained, you just gotta push out and reach new settlements; but fret not, because Magnimar isn't far, and it's big, and there are even bigger cities further out that can provide an inexhaustible source of all sorts of recruits.
Of course I reserve the right to change anything above that doesn't work, but I've been thinking about this for a while now, and I am pretty happy with these rules. All earlier drafts had been quite amateurish, but this seems fairly solid to me. We'll see how it goes, but it has gotten to a level of complexity where I felt I needed to write something down and post it so that I don't forget the math, and my reasoning for it.
